The app was created out of a desire to help promote local, independent businesses with potential new customers to drive user and business growth. SILBA shows a list of location-based shops, restaurants and experiences to the user, defaulting to their current location but which can be changed with by a user search via geolocation. The app also provides a marketplace for businesses to sell goods directly to users using secure payment methods. It also allows users to create an account, which allows them to log in, leave and view previous business reviews and order via the marketplace.

We used React Native Expo, Native Base, Axios, MongoDB, React Native Maps, Node.js, Express.js, Jest, Cloudinary, Render and Swagger.

We chose React Native Expo to allow us to create a mobile app which was deployable on both Android and iOS with a single code base and had inbuilt geolocation functionality. React Native Maps was the obvious choice to incorporate our mapping/location needs without the need for paid services. Native Base was used to incorporate Auth Provider to easily allow user login functionality throughout the app. For the back end, MondoDB was chosen for its powerful scalability and flexibility. The database was hosted and Mongo Atlas, the APIs hosted on Render and images hosted used Cloudinary. The APIs were created using Express.js, following a strict TDD approach using Jest. Finally, the API documents were created and hosted using Swagger, giving a highly professional look.

In the front end, apart from the huge task of learning React Native, the mapping aspect was probably the most challenging, as nearly every aspect required a lot of work to find the eventual solution, often involving working with different components in unison. With the back end, again, the challenge of learning and using a NoSQL database language cannot be understated. Additionally, there were several challenges with seeding and deployment.